Bowl Games in August?

Has it occurred to you that we are now opening the football season with bowl games?
Alabama and Clemson play an extemporaneous game can than only be akin to the post-season version. Tennessee crosses the country to taste the bitter gall of losing to a UCLA team it should have beaten by two touchdowns. Southern Cal comes East and plays Virginia in the Wahoos’ own backyard, where the Trojans put the blemish on the complexion of the ACC, which probably serves the ACC right for its raid of the Big East. You see, there’s something out of kilter with Georgia Tech opening its conference season in Massachusetts, and all these other teams criss-crossing the country before they’ve even flexed a muscle in their own precinct.

Oh, well, it all might be bundled into a conference called the ESPN League. ESPN calls, these teams jump like a frog on a June bug. (Never heard of a June bug? You catch them in a jug in June and watch their tail lights glow.) Great football coaches used to work for $25,000 a season, now they won’t even return the call for less than a million.

Now, for my highlight of the weekend: North Carolina had contracted two parachutists to deliver the game ball to Kenan Stadium for the Tar Heels’ opening game with McNeese State. The weather wasn’t the best for sky diving. The jumpers were having trouble finding Chapel Hill, so they took the hole they found in the clouds and made their landing—-in Duke Stadium, not Kenan. Nobody was hurt, but the jumpers were embarrassed when they found out they’d missd their mark by seven miles.

Give ’em credit. At least they found any stadium. As for the games, Duke beat James Madison with ease, Carolina had to use every play in the book to beat McNeese State. What I want to know is, did the sky divers get paid, and by whom?